Ripley’s showdown with the alien queen at the end of Aliens is one of the most thrilling scenes in cinematic history. With young Newt in peril, the loading doors suddenly open and there stands her protector, clad in a power loader suit, impressive hydraulic claws at the ready. The fact that Ripley’s wielding of this suit of …

The third Alien movie has a lot of problems. Not the least of which, as Ross points out in our Alien podcast episode, is that everything Ripley works so hard for in Aliens is negated in the first 20 minutes or so of the movie. It’s okay for a movie to buck expectations and go for a ‘darker’ …

Actress Sigourney Weaver was a scant 29 when she essayed the role of warrant officer Ellen Ripley in the film Alien. As Chad outlines in our Alien Films episode, she was up for the role against Meryl Streep, but beat out the more seasoned actress, whom she had gone to school with. Don’t worry about Meryl though, she …

When you consider all of the movie projects over the years that have been floated and then sunk under the waves of failed financing, at the top of the list has to be Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ambitious attempt at bringing Frank Herbert’s epic sci-fi book series Dune to the big screen. Here is the trailer for a …

It’s tough trying to remember everything about a movie series when you’re recording a podcast about it, but we still deserve multiple can-can kicks in the ass for neglecting to mention the Alien parody sequence from Mel Brooks’ classic 1987 sci-fi spoof Spaceballs. Not only do you get pretty good lookalikes of the Nostromo crew, you get poor …

Where we discuss the five major flicks in the Alien movie franchise: Alien (1979), Aliens (1986), Alien3 (1992), Alien: Resurrection (1997), and Prometheus (2012). The AvP movies get the occasional mention, but we decline to discuss them in-depth. We start out the show covering some upcoming and imminent genre stuff, such as Marvel’s Doctor Strange, …

We’ve been neglecting the other Alien films outside of the first two and Prometheus. There’s a perfectly good reason for that: they suck! But, we can’t ignore them completely, so here’s a bone thrown to 1997’s Alien: Resurrection. I won’t give a full synopsis to this dreck, but to put it in a nutshell: perennially evil Wayland-Yutani …

Here’s an interesting behind-the-scenes image from the making of Alien. From left, it’s director Ridley Scott, giving some instructions to Ian Holm as science officer Ash, and Sigourney Weaver as warrant officer Ripley. They’re inside another character from the film, the super computer that the crew affectionately (or not) refers to as Mother. Its actual designation …

Here is your crew of the USCSS Nostromo, tasked with hauling valuable ore from the outer colonies to Earth. Just a group of people trying to do a job, until a mysterious signal lures nearly all of them into the jaws of something horrible. Left to right, you have Kane, XO; Lambert, navigator; Dallas, captain; …

It seems an oxymoron to describe a crew on a craft in deep space as ‘grounded’, but that’s exactly what the Nostromo personnel in Alien feel like: a group of every-person truckers in space, just doing a job and looking to get paid at the end of it. Except for Ash, there’s something wrong with that twitchy, …

One of the signature features of the titular creature(s) from the Alien franchise, besides their elongated heads, sharp teeth and lethally telescoping tongues, are their ability to grow quickly into a menace for those unfortunates that come across them. The design of these dangerous beings morphed in a similar manner.

Design aspects of Alien were divided among various artists, and French illustrator Jean Girard aka Moebius was tasked with designing the outfits for the film, worn both internally and externally by the Nostromo crew. His spacesuits went through an evolution, dictated by the changing nature of the stormy planetoid they landed on according to various script …

What’s interesting when researching the Alien movies for our next podcast are the design elements that echo down through the franchise, from 1977 all the way to 2012 and undoubtedly beyond. Take, for instance, the containers that hold the earliest stage of the xenomorph, the facehugger. In the original Alien screenplay by Dan O’Bannon, they are “leathery urns …

I enjoyed Ridley Scott’s 2012 return to the Alien milleu, Prometheus. A prequel to the first film, it details a team travelling to a far star cluster to find the origins of life on Earth, and the nasty things that await them there. I enjoyed it, but I can certainly see why some people have a problem with …